Beijing supermarkets tipped off ahead of fish inspections
Some supermarkets in Beijing reportedly have received tips and removed most of their fish products from tanks in advance to avoid inspections before plans to conduct random checks were officially announced on Thursday.
The China Food and Drug Administration announced Thursday on its official website that it would carry out inspections in Beijing and 11 other cities across China due to concerns of pesticide contamination from now till the end of December.
However, freshwater fish were found to have been removed from tanks by supermarkets in the capital last week in a bid to avoid possible fines before the official announcement about possible contamination by the food authorities.
An insider with the food agency told Caixin Magazine that many Beijing supermarkets had already cleared out all freshwater fish from their stock before the inspec- tions were set to begin.
“This means that not only we have failed to keep this information confidential, but also there are some unwritten rules in the market and business operators seem to have a guilty conscience,” the anonymous official was quoted by Caixin as saying.
The Beijing Food and Drug Administration reiterated on its official Sina Weibo account on Wednesday that more than 90 percent of seafood in Beijing is up to standard and any report on water pollution and freshwater fish contamination is not reliable. There are plenty of fish still in the market, the agency posted.
According to the Beijing Youth Daily, only four of 20 supermarkets in Beijing it surveyed still had freshwater fish on sale. Most had either emptied the tanks or were only selling sea fish.
The inspections will mainly focus on the quality of the water in which the fish are kept and four kinds of seafood products – turbot fish, snakeheaded fish, mandarin fish and prawn, the administration posted on its website.
“The minimum fine is 50,000 yuan ($ 7,224), which would not cost the suppliers a fortune but would serve as a warning, especially when the supermarkets are facing fierce competition from online suppliers,” Zhu Yi, an associate professor from the College of Food Science and Nutritional Engineering at China Agricultural University, told the Global Times on Thursday.
She said that “it seems impossible to avoid pesticides under current method of fish farming and food products which are affected by pesticides but classified as safe would not be harmful to our health.”
She called for the government to investigate the source of the fish, otherwise there is no way to inspect their quality if they are removed from the stores.